In recent years, the Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has been widely viewed as the basic architecture of the next generation of wireless communication systems. Under this architecture and in consideration of the security and capability, an authentication procedure must be accomplished between a User Equipment (UE), an Evolved Node B (eNodeB), a Mobility Management Entity (MME) and a Home Subscriber Server (HSS) during an attachment procedure performed by the UE. Therefore, it is conceivable that signaling exchanges generated between the UE, the eNodeB, the MME and the HSS during the authentication procedure will necessarily consume much time and many resources.
Accordingly, an urgent need exists in the art to provide a solution to simplify the signaling exchanges needed for the authentication procedure during the attachment procedure performed by a UE under the basic architecture of the LTE technology of 3GPP.